Depends on how the airflow changes. Consider the smoking analogy – would opening/closing the window or turning on/off the AC reduce or increase the secondhand smoke exposure if someone were smoking there? Of course, many buildings cannot practically reduce secondhand smoke exposure to a level that is not bothersome or unhealthy, which is why smoking is commonly not allowed inside.
It is not like students in dorms do not go into common areas and hang out, like in cruise ships. Narrow hallways and stairwells, small elevators, and shared bathrooms also increase the forced proximity of students living in dorms.
I wonder if they considered polling the students and possibly their parents on how likely it would be that they would take legal action against the school if their student came down with covid and potentially died while at school? A tough question for sure, but very pertinent.
The kids seem to be a lot more sensible than some of the adults here, and maybe that’s not surprising. You might have noticed that they’re darned focused, on the whole.
My large university in a red state has just given guidance for fall: big courses online/hybrid only; small courses anything from online to in-person, at the discretion of the instructor, supervisors, and the facilities people, with (supposedly) online-from-the-classroom available for every course. The IT guys aren’t too sure about that last, since that costs money we don’t have to rig, but all in all it sounds like there’s one toe over the line into in-person, which can be hastily retracted.
No one will have to come to campus if they don’t want to, it sounds like, including faculty and most staff — not an issue they’re going to force. We’re all to get schooled up in teaching online over the summer, which is fine by me and should give the kids a much more predictable ride for the semester. What’ll we do for lab and studio courses where part of the point is learning technical facility with physical stuff…you know, I would not be surprised if some courses were simply put off while (for labs) much was done with canned data; and for the smaller studio courses, maybe having people in in rotations, in a block schedule, to minimize time on campus and exposure to others. Some studio courses will be able to move online.
Campus-experience-online talk has already started. My dean’s taken a voluntary pay cut, but there’ll be many more to follow, I’m sure. It’s a rhetorical and planning position that’ll be easy to yank back into all-online. Since my state is currently a virus dumpster fire, the odds from now of that happening are pretty good.
The money side has a lot to be worked out. But yeah. It’ll hurt. There’ll be discussions about mechanics and costs of mothballing buildings. On the other hand, the university won’t vanish, most people will continue to have job and get paid something, we’ll be hiring IT like crazy, and someday things will equilibrate.
This thread is making it clear to me, though, what kind of pressure our deans and president will be under to behave in foolish ways and invite people back to hang out and play football till, I don’t know, enough people get sick and start dying to convince some of the folks here that their kids’ campus experience is not worth other people’s health and lives. So I’m getting ready to support them. On the other hand, universities aren’t new to parent management. (I was dead impressed by UChicago’s summer program parent-management technique. Man, you didn’t even see it coming. They just marched the kids away as part of the orientation program while the parents, many of whom would absolutely have gone and installed themselves in the kids’ rooms if allowed, sat and watched, and then the prof in charge, who was wearing wellies indoors, told the parents, “Smell ya later.” Boom, over.)
There are people here clinging to the idea of testing like it’s their last collegiate hope, and I wonder how many here are too young to remember AIDS days. Even then, with AIDS a virus that’s relatively difficult to transmit, and with a less invasive, better-available test, and with public health imploring people to get tested and to demand tests before you slept with anyone because the virus was a death sentence — we didn’t know about any “mild” cases of AIDS from which people recovered — people didn’t so much go for testing unless they were afraid they’d caught it. Why? Easy:
- Embarrassment
- Fear of positive
- You could test negative even after you’d caught it; you’d have to “isolate” yourself sexually for quite a long time to make sure you (or your intended bed buddy) were getting an accurate read.
Covid-19’s not embarrassing, very, but 2 and 3 still pertain. So even if we had a brilliant testing regime, and we don’t and won’t because even if the manufacturing and distro were set up, the cost would be astronomical (imagine what we as a nation would spend on band-aids if everyone had to put on a fresh band-aid every morning, and band-aids are hella cheaper than swab tests), if you put several hundred kids in a building and during a pandemic, they’re going to get sick and infect other people. (Apart from which, what are you going to do with infected kids? I promise you, if we tested everyone’s kids daily, and we sent notice home saying “come get your infected kid,” we’d get eruptions from some parents about how the kid wasn’t infected and also how they can’t house an infected kid, grandma lives with them. Basically they’d refuse. Since we can’t set up a Covid dorm in which to imprison and treat kids who have nowhere to go, they’d just roam around infecting people.)
The two questions left, it seems to me, are:
- How long does this go on?
- How are we going to sort the COA money?
The answer to 1 is “we don’t know.”
However, 2 will force some long-overdue conversations. If you take “we would still like to have universities at the end of this”, as an endpoint, then someone has to pay to maintain physical and staffing assets. And you might be deeply shocked to find out how expensive they are, even though most university staff and faculty could in fact make more money elsewhere (normally).
More on 2 in a bit.
Wearing a non-N95 mask helps keep you from infecting others by capturing droplets when you sneeze, cough or even talk.
So when everyone wears one, everyone is more protected.
Also, some non medical masks are more protective than others in filtering droplets, which does protect you. More than one layer and tighter fabric weaves help, plus you can add a DIY filter to help.
Check this out to learn more:
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/best-diy-coronavirus-homemade-mask-material-covid/
Glad you’re wearing yours @melvin123 !
@ucbalumnus – True, but common rooms are still for relatively small groups. I doubt there was typically more than 5 or so in my D’s common room based on how she described her time hanging there. I suppose some dorms have bigger common spaces where I think you’d have to have social distancing or mask wearing.
So I think common rooms in dorms are not zero risk – but not a place for super spreading ‘events’ either.
Walking past someone in the hallway or stairwell would not be high risk. Elevators are a place to wear masks for sure.
Staggered shower schedules? 
There are no right answers. In fact now all there is are mostly just questions. As a nation, we need to decide what type of society we want. Essentially nothing will be materially different until we have a cure / vaccine available to the masses. You can test. You can trace. You can mitigate. You can contain. But the virus isn’t going away. So educate online or in person, daily life will result in the spread of an infectious disease.
When the whole “flatten the curve” discussion started, it was primarily about spreading out cases as to not overwhelm the healthcare system. It was NEVER about COVID 19 not spreading. We are far better prepared to handle cases today then two months ago. Somewhere along the way, it seems we’ve drifted into a goal of eliminating the spread (which can’t be done without a vaccine).
What will be vastly different in January than in September without a vaccine? Essentially nothing. So do schools not go live in January. What about Fall 2021? Vaccine’s still in final stages of mass production - hopefully. Do we not go back then?
Provided we’re equipped to deal with outbreaks (not saying we are), do we shelter at home for 18 months and watch our economy suffer to a point where many things never come back or do we just go back out there and take precautions (masks, handwashing, etc.)? Over that same 18 months, regardless of online or in person education, you have to figure humans are going to interact. So the virus will spread anyway whether it’s clusters of kids at universities or people taking the train to work or simply going to the grocery store. There’s no avoiding it.
Many will carry it without knowledge or symptoms. A small percentage will get sick. Most of them will get better without requiring medical care. Of those that require medical care, most will recover. And yes, some will die. Until we have a vaccine, this is reality.
Don’t know about today’s numbers but one week ago, our death rate per million was essentially the same as Sweden’s. At that time, we had 60 more deaths per million than Sweden. 60, that’s it. We have shut down our economy. They have done nothing. Is it worth the destruction? We have 20M unemployed and many more sole props, small business owners who will lose everything and never be counted in the unemployed numbers.
Again, we need to decide what type of society we want to be. In 2019, over 250k died from cancer in the US. In 2017, almost 270k died from heart disease in the US. Hopefully Covid 19 doesn’t reach anywhere near these numbers, but it may. We never did an all out attack on these diseases. I realize it’s different because this is a virus which spreads but just trying to keep things in perspective.
I have a current college Freshman “interrupted” at home from UMD-CP as well as 3 other kids at home doing on line learning for a total of 4 kids at home and 2 parents with full time jobs WFH. One of the other kids is a HS Junior who had both her SAT and ACT cancelled and has no test scores. We live in a hot spot with probably no hope of in an person shot at those and my student has a LD and 504 so online learning is a real challenge. As of right now she can’t even apply to her state flagship due to lack of scores. Crazy train!
I view my D’s school, which is very large, as a COMMUNITY that includes the students, the teachers, and the folks that support the students by working there. If I were making a decision it would be based on the level of risk to the community. Life is changed as we know it and we are going to have to adapt but we can do so with empathy and by making people’s jobs accessible to them in different ways. Everyone has sacrifices to make that do not have to include their lives.
For us and for all of you that have decisions to make it will be your own to make. If I don’t want to pay for UMD on line in Fall than I just won’t but I personally fall into the camp that my D is receiving a quality education from her teachers that are from UMD. If your child got into an awesome University and you just can’t swallow the online idea–don’t. I think all of next year for most of us will be online. Maybe some places without virus will give it a try but will receive students from hot spots and that will be it.
Oh, rest assured they’re willing. But with parents – even on this forum – who think that online learning should cost less and be delivered by cheap adjuncts – this will be hard to carry off.
This pandemic has sadly shown the real values many Americans hold. And what we’ve seen is often not pretty.
My graduate-level school has advised all it professors to prepare for an online fall. We are meeting with course designers later in the month and receiving training in our new online tools. I expect the resulting product to be much better than the Zoom classes we held this past spring. Will that keep enough students engaged and enrolled? Don’t know - but my fingers are crossed. On the plus side, we will finally get the IT upgrade all of us have been begging for and the school will probably save some money by slashing its travel/food/entertainment budget.
I agree we are nowhere near where we need to be in terms of testing. A friend called today and gleefully told me she tested positive for antibodies - but she never was seriously ill or diagnosed with the sickness. So it could be a false positive and she knows it. Tests like that don’t help anyone and certainly won’t help schools reopen.
My daughter’s mid-size university shared its plans last week for fall semester. It’s typical of what other schools have shared with hybrid learning, 1-2 kids per dorm room (means they will have to find alternate housing off campus), identified space on campus for kids who need to be quarantined, etc. Their plan is to open campus, as long as state and county orders permit that. One big change in plans is to the school calendar. Normally classes start after Labor Day and finish days before Christmas. This year they have decided to start mid-August and finals will be before Thanksgiving so kids will head home in November. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. My daughter is already in an off campus apartment and never came home for spring semester. She will stay at school for her senior year regardless if campus reopens.
.
I’m assuming you meant through all this, we had only 60 LESS deaths per million than Sweden, right? (according to the published numbers).
That’s 60 X 350 which is about 21,000 less deaths than if we had the same rate. 21,000. You’re right. What were we thinking?
(And of course, don’t bother factoring in Sweden’s better health care, better ability to follow basic precautions, and increased rate of single people living alone).
But sure, what a waste of effort for 21,000 less deaths.
My son is admitted to Western but decided not to attend.
Well, given that we might very well have 75k deaths of despair from the economic ruin, then the extra 21k deaths from not closing would have been worth it, particularly in terms of life years lost.
Can’t really feel sorry for colleges- a demographic reckoning was coming anyway, and this just hastened that by a few years. The current higher ed model was not sustainable anyway.
^^Yes 60 LESS (my mistake) deaths per million.
I’m just stating numbers. Not assigning value to them. So 21k could sound really scary to some. Others think it’s not even a rounding error in 330M. Again, who do we want to be, and what are we willing to do about it?
We could also all agree to drive at 40 MPH on the highway, have the laws changed, enforce it etc. and watch the vehicular death toll drop by thousands each yr but we don’t do that. Are those presumed saved lives less important? We could outlaw alcohol and saves thousands each yr from impaired related accidents, domestic abuse, alcoholism, etc. but we don’t. Again, are those presumed save lives less important?
Those may sound ridiculous (and they do!), but shutting the country down sounds pretty ridiculous too.
False postives are rare - the antibody tests have 99% accuracy for positive results.
Great article here (from today). Prior FDA director thinks we’ll have the testing we need soon - https://time.com/5836206/scott-gottlieb-covid-19-testing-systems/
I agree.
This will put some colleges out of their misery, which is evidently the only way to stop them from throwing good money after bad. Some non-selective LACs and directionals may not even make it another year.
The good thing is that even if several hundred schools close up shop (because they are likely to be relatively smaller in terms of student numbers), there will still be plenty of college seats for everyone who wants one.
I really want DS’s dad to get the antibody test. He was very sick January/February with some respiratory thing…oh…and his wife and her family are from China about 200km from Wuhan. She was there in January, but was there when he started to get sick, but her brother was here over Christmas.
Anyhow, I spent many hours in the car with him when he was sick visiting colleges with DS and am extremely curious if he had it. If so, I’ll get the antibody test as well.
Could not agree more.